The Brookings India Foreign Policy Tiffin Talks are a new series of closed-door seminars where scholars present their evidence-based research and interact with peers and practitioners on India’s security and strategic affairs. It seeks to expose a new generation of policy analysts to cutting-edge and policy-relevant research from Indian and international scholars.

Nayudu will present her recent findings on India’s response to international crises between 1945 and 1965, with a specific focus on peacekeeping commitments in the Korean War, the Suez Canal Crisis, and the Hungarian Revolution, the crises in Lebanon and in the Congo. Based on newly declassified archival sources, she will foreground India’s relations with the Soviet Union as being pivotal to India’s mediatory role in resolving these crises. The talk will further evaluate India’s response to the Prague Spring of 1968, which brings together trends that emerged in the period under examination.

Swapna Kona Nayudu is an Associate at Harvard University’s Asia Center and is also affiliated to the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Swapna is interested in international relations theory, political theory, diplomatic studies and global intellectual history. Her first book based on her doctoral dissertation from King’s College is presently under review, while she has begun work on her second major project – an intellectual history of India’s relations with Japan and South Africa in the twentieth century.

Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor, will lead the discussion on how the historical record presented by Nayudu can also help us assess India’s future involvement in peacekeeping, mediation and other regional and global crises.

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At the end of the Obama administration, a fragile bipartisan consensus had emerged with regard to U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Under the terms of this agreement—memorialized in the U.S. Senate’s resolution to ratify the New START Treaty in 2010—arms control advocates agreed to fund the modernization of the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent in exchange for deterrence advocates supporting nuclear arms control. However, in the Trump era, that consensus is fraying. Many arms control advocates are now calling for cancelling key strategic modernization systems like the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) nuclear cruise missile and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missile. On the other hand, some deterrence advocates are seriously questioning whether that United States should extend New START. Given this increasing polarization, is it possible to maintain the existing consensus on U.S. nuclear weapons policy?

On January 7, 2019, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings will host a discussion involving experts and former government officials to explore this question. Following their conversation, panelists will take audience questions.

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In nearly every major Muslim-majority country, Islam is an important—and sometimes the only ideological currency that mixes effectively with realpolitik. The discussion of Islam in world politics in recent years has tended to focus on how religion is used by a wide range of social movements, political parties, and militant groups. However, less attention has been paid to the question of how governments—particularly those in the Middle East—have incorporated Islam into their broader foreign policy conduct. Whether it is state support for transnational religious outreach, the promotion of religious interpretations that ensure regime survival, or competing visions of global religious leadership, they all embody what has been termed the “geopolitics of religious soft power.”

On January 8, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings will launch a new report entitled “Islam as statecraft: How governments use religion in foreign policy.” Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid and Nonresident Senior Fellow Peter Mandaville will assess how various governments incorporate religion and outreach into their broader foreign policy, from the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, to how the governments of prominent Muslim-majority countries have positioned themselves as the purveyors of a “moderate Islam.” Following the discussion, the panelists will take questions from the audience.